I've been hard at work on my forthcoming social drawing app, so
updates for BatteryBot and Noteworthy have been slow. I expect to
release the new app in a few weeks (for the web, Android, and iOS),
and then I have some updates planned for the Android apps.

While I've set up a business and hope to continue making money from
my apps (how else could I afford to keep making them?), I'm not
willing to compromise my ethics in the process. If I make less
money because of this, or eventually have to close the business, I
can live with that. I wouldn't be able to live with compromising my
values. I'm personally more likely to purchase from companies whose
ethics fit my own, and I think others are too, so hopefully things
more or less equal out.

In any case, the primary values that are relevant here (although
there are many) are a user-first focus and open source.

User First

This encompasses user friendliness, making sure apps are fun and
easy to use. But it goes much further than that. As an avid user
of software, I have strong feelings about when it seems like
software is made for me — to make my life better —
versus when it feels like I'm only valued as a way for a company to
make money.

Most businesses have the primary goal of making money, and in order
to accomplish that, they try to do something useful. It's often
easy to see the priority of profit over utility and feel taken
advantage of as a customer.

I turn those normal priorities upside down. The goal of this
business is to create software that I personally find both useful
and easy to use — hopefully even fun — and that other
people will find just as useful, easy, and fun. The users come
first and the software and any money I make come second. I need
to make money to stay in business, but it's not worth staying in
business if my users come second.

No Ads

One way this plays out is by not having ads in my apps. I'm not
100% against ads in general, but in most apps that have ads, I feel
like I'm not valued as a person, just as a source of income. The
presence of ads makes it decidedly un-fun to use the app, and it
feels like my experience as a user isn't valued. It feels like the
developers want to extract every last cent out of me that they can.
That doesn't feel good, and that's not the kind of business I'm
running here.

Therefore my apps do not have ads, even in the free version.

Useful Free Version

Another thing that putting users first means to me is that my apps
can be used for free, and that they are useful even when used
for free. In a great many cases I've experienced, the free version
of an app is either riddled with ads or it is a severely limited
experience — either a time-limited trial or so lacking in
features as to not be very useful.

I strive to always achieve a careful balance so that the free
version is actually useful, and many users will be perfectly
satisfied using it indefinitely. I hope that the paid features are
so useful that many people will be happy to upgrade, and because
there are no ads and the free version isn't overly limited, they
will feel good about upgrading, rather than feel
coerced. And some users may pay to upgrade just to support my
business, even if they don't actually need any of the paid features.

Open Source

I'm a big fan of open source software, and like everyone, I've
benefited from it enormously. Android itself is mostly open source,
as is much of the software the makes the internet work. In some
ways, being open source is another way of putting the user first.
It's also a way of giving back to the community and supporting the
wider ecosystem that we all benefit from.

While I do not release all of my work as open source, I do so with
the majority of it. The software I produce is open source by
default, and only closed source when I have good reason to do
so.